THEATER REVIEW: 'Golda's Balcony' stands on its own

Friday

Mar 31, 2017 at 4:21 PMMar 31, 2017 at 4:23 PM

By R. Scott Reedy, Daily News Correspondent

WATERTOWN - Golda Meir – Israel’s first, and so far only, female prime minister – was seen by some as the straight-talking grandmother of the Jewish people. In “Golda’s Balcony,” however, playwright William Gibson makes clear that, even with her gray bun and ever-present sensible shoes, Meir was anything but benign.

“I’m known for making chicken soup for our soldiers,” says the self-aware Meir at the outset of Gibson’s 2003 one-act play now at Watertown’s New Repertory Theatre. “Chicken soup, yes, but there is blood at the bottom of the pot.”

The house lights are still up when we first glimpse Meir – being played by the appropriately diminutive Newton actress Bobbie Steinbach as every inch the steel-fisted strongwoman – she is stolidly making her way to center stage behind the gauzy fabric panels that serve both to encase Jiyoung Han’s stylized, multilevel set and to display Seaghan McKay’s evocative projections.

Set in 1978, the play has the then-80-year-old looking back on her life with particular focus on the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when both Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. The term “Golda’s balcony” refers to an area from which high-ranking visitors can view the underground section of Israel’s Dimona nuclear installation. With that in mind, Gibson has the Kiev-born, Milwaukee-raised Meir threatening to launch nuclear weapons against her adversaries – and potentially initiating World War III – if then U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger don’t bring America’s power to Israel’s defense.

Before becoming Israel’s fourth elected prime minister in 1969, at the age of 70 - she would die of lymphoma in 1978 -Meir had a long and varied life. Emigrating from Russia with her family in 1906, she fervently embraced Zionism from an early age. When she married Jewish socialist Morris Meyerson in 1917, the onetime Wisconsin schoolteacher made settling in Palestine a prerequisite to the union, and by 1921 the young couple had moved to a kibbutz there.

Meir soon began her rise as a formidable politician and fundraiser who would bring in $50 million from U.S. donors to purchase arms from Europe and to support the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Meir was referred to as the “Iron Lady” of Israeli politics, long before that moniker was applied to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The versatile Steinbach – last seen at the New Rep as Yente the matchmaker in the sold-out December run of “Fiddler on the Roof” – blends world-weary exhaustion with firebrand ferocity to bring the always strategizing stateswoman vividly to life. Not long after quietly sharing, “I am at the end of my stories,” Steinbach sheds Meir’s chenille robe to take us back to a time when she was feverishly fielding phone calls in an effort to settle her country’s rapidly escalating conflict with Egypt.

Under Judy Braha’s taut direction, Steinbach moves with skillful aplomb between the heavier themes – supported by everything from cawing birds to rapid-fire artillery in David Wilson’s mood-setting sound design – and the play’s lighter moments. Steinbach’s ability to bring Meir’s mother, Kissinger and other characters to life is hampered somewhat, however, by her use of essentially the same voice and sound throughout.

Gibson first wrote about Meir in his 1977 multi-character play, “Golda,” which, even with Anne Bancroft in the title role, had only a short Broadway run. He revisited the subject 25 years later with this single-character treatment, which had its 2002 premiere at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox where it featured Annette Miller. A 2003 production at New York’s Helen Hayes Theatre earned star Tovah Feldshuh a Tony Award nomination and went on to become the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history.

New Rep Artistic Director Jim Petosa had a different kind of history in mind when he decided to present “Golda’s Balcony” this season. According to Braha, writing in a program note, Petosa wanted to present the story of Israel’s first female prime minister shortly after what he expected would be the election of the first woman president of the United States.

That plan did not come to pass, of course, but that doesn’t make this the story of a Hillary Clinton who actually won the election. Like the singular woman whose long life of service inspired it, “Golda’s Balcony” stands on its own quite nicely.